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Just some thoughts on the significance of perception...

In class on Tuesday, I was asked, as a dyslexic person "what does a page of text look like to you?" since then,I have been struggling to think of a way I could explain my experience as a dyslexic person to you non-dyslexics out there. This is made pretty difficult by the fact that I have nothing to compare by perceptions with- I have never not had dyslexia. That is the answer I gave in class, but looking back, I feel that it is a little bit of a cop-out to just revert to personal relativity. I might as well have answered Paul's question by asking "Well, what does a page of text look like to you?". If there were no way to convey personal perceptions, how would any sort of exchange ever take place between two individuals? It is in the name of this goal that I'm going to try, now, to explain to you what it's like for me to be dyslexic.

In first grade, I was told that in order to tell my left from my right, I could hold out my hands, palms away from me, fingers up and thumbs held horizontally. My forefinger and thumb of my left hand, my teacher told me, would make an L. From that day on until I was about 10 years old, I was convinced I had two left hands. (For the record, I have anatomically normal hands, I just couldn't see the difference between an 'L' and a backwards 'L'.) This story illustrates nicely the difficulty I have distinguishing left from right. It's not just that I don't know which hand is which, but I have a much deeper confusion about this sort of directionality. I really don't see a difference between letters written forwards or backwards, left to right or right to left. (this made b's and d's particularly difficult when I was younger.) I learned tricks to help me get by in elementary school. For instance, I now write with my paper held horizontally so that my actual notes are written in horizontal lines (relative to me)... apparently I don't have the same problem distinguishing up from down as I do with left and right (although, now p's and b's pose the same problem as b's and d's used to).

I read an article in the New York Times several years ago (“A Boy, a Mother, And a Rare Map of Autism’s World”; By Sandra Blakeslee; New York Times; 19 November, 2002... http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9404EFDA1130F93AA25752C1A9649C8B63 ) in which an autistic boy named Tito, who cannot speak or socially interacting with others by any normative standard, writes very eloquently about his experiencing of the world as an autistic individual. The article explains that when Tito was 4, he was looking at a cloud when he heard someone talking about bananas. It took him years to realize that bananas and clouds were different. Reading this, I recognize something of my own struggle to illuminate to you how I experience the world. I can give you anecdotes and specifics, but I cannot seem to find a way to impart to you a complete understanding of me reality as a dyslexic person any more than Tito can let me know, really know, what it's like to not be aware of my own body, or distinguish the difference between bananas and clouds. It seems that we are all ultimately mired in our own perceptions of the world, because outside of our perceptions, how are we to conceive of reality?

Okay... I think I've said more than I originally meant to. And I never worked in the subject line. It's referring to an essay by a philosopher named Thomas Nagel entitled "What is it like to be a Bat?". It's a pretty good piece- at least, I had fun reading it. If you would like to take a look, almost all of it is available on google-scholar (link below), the gist of his point is that even though he can imagine several possibilities of a bat's reality, at the end of the day he concludes that he's not a bat, so he doesn't know the answer to the question he has posed. I haven't read any counter-positions to this point, but if any body had any, I'd love to take a look at them...

((((What is it like to be a bat:

http://64.233.179.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&q=cache:7sElIgW9i4QJ:www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf+

It's a little easier to read if you download it as a pdf... click the link that will appear right at the top of the page in the little google-y box for the pdf version. ))))